The free MotoPress alternative, with nothing to host
MotoPress Hotel Booking is a WordPress plugin at $139 a year, syncing OTAs through iCal. Tribii is a hosted system, free up to 20 rooms, with a real two-way channel manager on Max.
An honest, side by side comparison.
MotoPress pricing vs Tribii
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$139/yr + WordPress hosting
How each company describes its own pricing, in their own words, from their public pricing pages. It is not the cost-to-match figure the comparison uses: that one is in the table below, with its basis. See their live pricing.
Data verified August 2026The licence is the cheap half.
The free Lite plugin lists rooms and takes booking requests, but it pays you through PayPal or a bank transfer and never syncs an OTA calendar. Stripe and iCal sync both sit behind the Pro licence. And because this is a WordPress plugin rather than a hosted product, the site it runs on is your bill, not theirs.
| Capability | MotoPress | Tribii |
|---|---|---|
| Card payments through Stripe | $139/yr | Included, free |
| A theme built for the plugin | $89 | Included, free |
| WordPress hosting and updates | Your own bill | Included, free |
| Invoicing and a monthly ledger | Not available | Included, free |
| AI setup and migration | Not available | Included, free |
| Total to match | $139/yr + hosting | Free - hosted, website included |
The licence is $139 a year for one site; the theme is a one-off, so the two are shown separately rather than summed into one misleading figure. Hosting is a real cost but not theirs to price, so we leave it blank rather than invent a number. Source: their pricing page (August 2026)
Choose Tribii if…
- You want two-way OTA sync of rates and availability, not iCal polling.
- You do not want to run, update and secure a WordPress site.
- You want a real invoicing system, which MotoPress does not have.
- You want a free plan for 20 rooms rather than a yearly licence.
MotoPress may fit better if…
- You want the booking system itself inside your own WordPress install, not hosted by someone else.
- You want full control of the design through Elementor, Divi or Gutenberg.
- You want to own the code and data on your own hosting, with a REST API.
Tribii replaces MotoPress with a free booking engine and the free hotel PMS, free for up to 20 rooms with 0% commission on direct bookings.
Tribii vs MotoPress, line by line.
How we price this: for each company we take the cheapest plan they publish that does what Tribii's Free plan does, a booking engine that can take an online card payment, a website, and reservations, rates and invoicing, for a 20-room property. Where a company publishes no price at all, we say so and the range shown is marked as an estimate: it is ours, not a quote from them. Prices are shown in the currency each company publishes and are never converted. Where you land may differ, so check their pricing page before deciding.
Comparison compiled by Tribii from public product information. Competitor plans and prices change: check their current pricing before deciding.
Where Tribii is different from MotoPress
Two-way sync, not iCal
MotoPress syncs OTAs through iCal: it reads their calendars as often as every 15 minutes, and each OTA reads MotoPress's calendar back on its own schedule (Airbnb about every 3 hours). iCal carries dates, not rates or restrictions. Tribii Pro includes the same kind of iCal sync, checked every 5 minutes; Tribii Max pushes availability, rates and restrictions both ways in seconds.
Hosted for you
MotoPress needs a WordPress site you host, update and secure, plus a theme (theirs are $89). Tribii runs itself, with the website builder included free. Keeping your WordPress site? A free plugin adds Tribii's booking to its pages.
Financials
Tribii includes invoicing and a monthly ledger free. MotoPress handles taxes and fees on a booking but is not an invoicing system at all.
Tribii vs MotoPress, in depth
What iCal sync can and cannot do
This is the difference that matters most. MotoPress synchronises with Airbnb, Booking.com and others through iCal feeds. It can read an OTA's calendar as often as every quarter hour, but the OTA reads MotoPress's calendar on its own schedule, which for Airbnb is about every three hours, and no plugin can make it read sooner. iCal is a calendar format: it moves blocked dates, not prices and not restrictions. That gap is where double bookings live, and it means rates still get typed into every extranet by hand. Tribii Pro offers iCal sync too, with the same honest limits; Tribii Max replaces it with a real two-way channel manager.
The licence is not the cost
At $139 a year the plugin looks inexpensive, and as a plugin it is. The bill around it is WordPress hosting, a theme if you want the booking flow to look right (theirs are $89), and the add-ons: $99 for WooCommerce payment gateways, $99 for payment requests, $69 for event-driven emails. Their own bundle of nine add-ons at $199 a year is a fair signal of how many people end up needing. Then it is yours to update and secure.
When a plugin is the right answer
If you already have a WordPress site you like, with a design you control in Elementor or Divi, adding booking to it rather than moving to a separate system is a genuinely reasonable choice, and MotoPress is among the best plugins for it. Tribii is the other trade: the booking engine is hosted, updated and synced for you. You can still keep the WordPress site, since a free plugin places Tribii's booking in its pages as a block, but the booking flow itself is rendered by Tribii, so you give up control over its markup.
Moving from MotoPress is free. Export your bookings and Tribii's AI onboarding imports your rooms, rates and reservations.
You do not have to rebuild your website: paste the Tribii booking widget where your current one sits, on WordPress, Wix, Squarespace or a hand-coded page. On WordPress there is also a free plugin that does it without code. Or build a new site free with the website builder.
Questions about switching
Still have a question?
64 answers on signing up, what it costs, getting paid, moving your bookings across and what your country requires, all in one place.
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